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Thoughtlets. LIII. Gossepistemology.
I’m suggesting a novel portmanteau, at least in as far as a cursory Google search tells me: Gossepistemology. Gossip + Epistemology. (*Google provides links to myriad articles on gossip & epistemology.) In Philosophy, epistemology is the branch concerned with the study of knowledge. A classical concern of epistemology is the distinction between opinion and knowledge Continue reading
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Thoughtlets. LII. Malthusian Trivia: Not an Enemy of Population Growth
About 10 years ago I spent what I call The Summer of Malthus. By which I mean that one of the tasks I was set to as a research assistant was to read Robert Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, searching for what Malthus takes to be ‘vice’. I read a copy Continue reading
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Saturday Morning Pam-toons. In Matters of Love and War — And All Matters In Between — There is No Dearth of Armchair Psychiatrists
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Bread and Circuses
(Originally posted Oct. 24, 2020) Somewhere around the second century CE, the Roman satirist Juvenal coined the phrase ‘bread and circuses’ which has come to mean placating one’s populace with cheap bribes to distract them from their political grievances. Here’s the logic. Thomas Hobbes observed that “If any two men [sic] desire the same thing, Continue reading
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Saturday Morning Pam-toons. The CDC reports an alarming number of repetitive strain injuries during the Finger-Wagging pandemic.
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What, if anything, is wrong with MSNBC, CNN, and FOX? (Part 1 of 2)
My other half habitually surfs through a number of national and international news channels in the evenings. Our house is small, so I’m captive to whatever noise emanates from these rotating broadcasts. Sometimes this noise really gets under my skin. Such as? Such as the current tabloid coverage of the Gabby Petito case by the Continue reading
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Small house in a big world. The power of perspective.
I don’t know how old I was when I first heard I live in a very small house, but my windows look out on a very big world. But as one of my dad’s favourite quotes, I’ve known it as long as I can remember. Up until recently, I’ve attributed the quote to Thoreau. But Continue reading
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Thoughtlets. XLVI. Observing patterns of human behaviour.
Some find Tacitus’ Annals tedious. Some of it is. But his work keeps me riveted. I’m not so interested in history, per se. Rather I’m interested in identifying patterns of human behaviour, events that repeat over millennia, and asking why they repeat themselves. But then, so was Tacitus, “Perhaps there is a sort of cycle Continue reading
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